The Etteilla Inversion: Why Tarot's First Professional Reader Flipped Everything

Today's Lesson In 1785, a Parisian wig-maker and seed merchant named Jean-Baptiste Alliette published the first book devoted entirely to tarot divination. Writing under the pen name Etteilla (his surname spelled backward), he created something unprecedented: a complete system where reversed cards meant something specific and different from upright ones. Before Etteilla, tarot reversals weren't a standard practice. Card players didn't care which way cards faced, and the scattered fortune-telling traditions that existed rarely mentioned orientation. Etteilla changed all that, assigning distinct meanings to upright and reversed positions for every single card—a practice so influential that most readers today assume it's always been part of tarot. But here's where it gets interesting: Etteilla didn't just standardize reversals. He completely redesigned the cards themselves, renaming them, reordering the Major Arcana, and adding keywords directly onto the card faces. His deck looked nothing like the traditional Italian or French decks of his time. He claimed his system was based on ancient Egyptian wisdom (it wasn't—the Egypt craze was pure 18th-century speculation), but what he actually created was the first deck designed exclusively for divination rather than gaming. Love him or hate him, Etteilla professionalized tarot reading, making it a service people would…